One of the advantages Fantasy Flight has over other game publishers is the strength of their in-house media department, run by the fantastically talented Keith Hurley with the able assistance of Jason Beaudoin.
They’ve just released their video overview of Horus Heresy, with lots of great interview material from Alan Merritt, Games Workshop’s intellectual property chief. Yours Truly also natters on therein.
(You can see a larger version at the FFG website, or directly at YouTube.)
This particular project is about the best I’ve been able to do, so far, in incorporating what I think is meaningful story into the board game format while preserving the open choices necessary to make a board game fun. I’m thrilled that so many of the session reports and reviews of the game at BoardGameGeek suggest that I was successful, for some percentage of players, at least. If you’ve played Horus Heresy and have an opinion, do tell.
Dude!
So, I’m a longtime Warhammer 40K geek. I even used to own the original Horus Heresy, until I sold it because it just wasn’t getting gameplay at the time. So, when I heard that FFG was releasing a new version of the game, I was stoked.
I’ve been able to play twice, both against my wife, who is a gamer but not really a wargamer. Both times, I’ve played as the Traitor. Both times, I’ve lost.
Yes, I’m admitting that on the Internet.
The second game was particularly intense. I had seized definitive control of the two southern space ports and was pushing north. My Chaos Marines were assaulting an inferior force at Eternity Wall Space Port and I was preparing to maneuver towards Lions’ Gate Space Port when disaster struck. Suddenly, six Marine divisions plus a task division, led by Sanguinius, Primarch of the Blood Angels Space Marines, materialized aboard the Vengeful Spirit, my flagship in orbit over embattled Terra. They cut through my outer layer of defenders and were poised to attack Horus on the bridge of his own spacecraft. (In fact, if it were not for a rules error on my part, this massive troop concentration would have attacked the very same turn.)
Horus was forced to flee to the planet’s surface, with the loyalist Marines in hot pursuit. It became a deadly race to the finish, with traitor forces hammering at the last loyalist space port, where the Emperor himself had emerged to lead the last defense, while loyalist Marines harried Horus as he attempted to make his escape.
I was foiled. I needed one more point of damage in my last battle–one!–and I would have captured the final space port. Instead, a single battered Titan (three damage taken out of four) held the space port long enough for the Blood Angels to slaughter Horus at the base of the walls of the Imperial Palace.
What a great game!
Also:
The videos that FFG makes for its games are the second-best piece of marketing that they do for their games. I really enjoyed the new Horus Heresy video that you posted here.
(The best piece of marketing that FFG does for their games is posting PDFs of their rulebooks online. I’ve bought a couple of games after nosing around their rulebooks.)
Mayfair does this too, with my buds at Pulp Gamer:
Glover Forever!
Mayfair does this too, with my buds at Pulp Gamer:
Glover Forever!